Key objective

The key objective is to increase youth participation and collaboration in decision making processes with regards to democratic governance by empowering young people from across the world to invent and propose new, innovative and concrete actions aiming at reinventing democracy by taking advantage of what the digital era has to offer.

More than 1000 young people will contribute with ideas face-to-face and virtually during five Co-Laboratories engaging ICT and structured democratic dialogue methodology. The process is designed to mobilize young people and to increase interaction among youth globally with the aim to advocate for and enable meaningful youth participation in democratic processes.

Problem Analysis

Young people between 15 and 25 years old represent a fifth of the world’s population, yet they remain largely absent from or under-represented in political decision-making processes. Today’s young people are the owners of the future and will eventually become the leaders of tomorrow. It is therefore imperative they develop a sense of ownership through meaningful participation in democratic processes. Despite low youth participation in political processes and elected institutions, young people participate in democratic life through other means, such as political movements, youth organizations, and ad-hoc community initiatives mostly on informal arenas. Their meaningful participation in these processes depends on the political, socio-economic and cultural context and requires both young people and youth organizations to have the opportunities and capacities for youth participation, as well as operate within an enabling environment for civil society and especially young people.
While youths across the world are facing similar problems to access the political decision-making arena there are limited opportunities for them to share those experiences and to explore and propose solutions in a structured way and through personal meetings. To become a stronger voice there is a need for youth around the world to unite.

Contents

Global Scope

The UNDEF contract foresees the involvement of more than 1000 young change makers from across the world in a global exercise to re-invent and re-design systems of governance for the digital era.

In addition to the five Structured Democratic Dialogues, the project team invites other global, regional, or national initiatives to join with their own funding and/or with funding secured jointly in order to expand the scope to more regions and more people.

Experts will be evaluating the ideas of participants on a number of dimensions such as: Impact, Feasibility, Innovation, Possibility of happening without intervention/external support, and Desirability. Their opinions will be compared and contrasted with the total averages of the evaluations conducted by the particiopants themselves and discussed if there are deviations.